What's Surprising About the Apple iPad

Given all the hype surrounding the Apple iPad tablet, perhaps the most surprising thing is that Apple was still able to well, surprise. Watching the announcement and then spending a little time with one of the units, I found a number of things that I wasn't expecting.

Given all the hype surrounding the Apple tablet, perhaps the most surprising thing is that Apple was still able to have some pretty big surprises at the iPad launch this morning. Watching the announcement and then spending a little time with one of the units, I found a number of things that I wasn't expecting.

In particular, the pricing was much more aggressive than I thought it would be, at least on the entry level. The machine felt faster and more responsive. And there were more applications aimed at creating content.

The basic form factor was pretty much was most people were expecting. The iPad looks like a big iPhone or iPod touch with a 9.7-inch LED-backlit LCD display. The screen is 1024 by 768, and it runs on a 1-GHz Apple A4 custom processor. It comes with 802.11n and optional 3G wireless support. More important, it comes with applications for mail, Web browsing, photos, videos, music, maps, and book reading. For more details, see PCMag's full coverage.

The big surprise in the announcement was the pricing. The basic unit, with Wi-Fi only and 16GB of flash memory, will sell for $499. While that may not be enough storage to hold all of your media library, it is enough for a lot of people, and as a result, it opens the iPad up to a much larger potential audience. There will also be a 32GB version for $599 and a 64GB one for $699. (In comparison, an iPod touch with a smaller screen, battery, and less capable processor and apps is $300 less.)

The wireless broadband plans were also a pleasant surprise. Versions of the iPad with 3G built in cost $130 more, bringing the cost of the most expensive version (with 64GB) up to $829 - which seems like a reasonable price for a 3G modem. But the good news is that the plans are far less expensive: $14.99 a month for up to 250MB of data and $29.99 for unlimited data via AT&T. This is far less than the price of most broadband access plans.

While Apple's Steve Jobs said most people will be just fine with the lower plan, I wonder, given the size of the screen and the ability to download and play HD movies. It will be interesting to see how AT&T notifies you if you're approaching its limits. But still, these are very aggressive plans.

As I used the unit, I found a number of things to be better than I expected. Web browsing (via Wi-Fi) was quite fast, with pages refreshing very quickly. It felt as fast as browsing pages on a regular laptop, and thus notably faster than browsing the same pages on an iPhone or iPod touch (via WI-FI). The Maps application (which uses Google maps as a back end) was a particular revelation: Maps zoomed very quickly, and the "street view" feature came in and redrew notably quickly too. While I initially was skeptical of the use of Maps on a tablet, the speed and the multitouch interface made this surprising impressive.

The page-rendering speed is obviously a combination of the software and hardware in the device, and as usual, Apple wouldn't give many details. The browser is Safari, which is quick on rendering on laptops; and the A4 processor clearly uses some sort of ARM-based core (for compatibility with the iPhone apps), plus special graphics to speed rendering. Clearly, Apple has a special and very powerful processor. Jobs said the iPad will last "up to 10 hours" which is great for an LCD-based, WiFI device. We'll have to see in the real world, of course.

The one big downside to the browser was that it still does not support Adobe Flash, which means that video on sites like Hulu or the networks simply does not work. Apple representatives said the Web was moving to HTML 5, but that's a slow transition, if it happens.

The other big surprise to me was the emphasis on content creation applications. I expected the device to do a good job with playing videos and music, displaying photos. But I wasn't expecting a demo of a painting application (called Brushes, now out for the iPhone), and certainly not of productivity applications, like the iWork suite.

These applications, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers (for presentations, word processing and spreadsheets), are special iPad versions of Apple's Mac productivity suite that will be available for $9.99 each. I'm not sure that most people will actually create a lot of content on the iPad, but the apps make the device a lot more flexible.

I'll have more to say later, but at first glance, these were the things I found most surprising. Of course, given all the hype, it's just amazing that anything unexpected happened.

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